Animations

[iamyourdad]

is it possible to add brand new Animations to kotor like darth malaks?

[Sithspecter]

Possible, yes. Probable? No. Adding brand new animations is very time consuming, and can be frustrating at the best of times. Plus, the new ones have to correspond with the old ones, otherwise you end up with some pretty wacky looking fight scenes, where the melee weapons don't connect at all.

[iamyourdad]

so how would you do that?

[Sithspecter]

Well, first of all, you'd have to import the model that you want to add animations to. You'll have to use MDLOps 6.0 and make sure that you import the animations when you convert it to ASCII. Then, find all of the supermodels that exist for the normal models, compile them together, and import that also. Cross reference the supermodel to the model that you want to update, and figure out which animations are missing. Then, replicate the format of the original model, and animate the new model for all of the missing animations. But, Malak, for instance, is missing somewhere around 12,000 frames of animation, I believe. Trust me, you don't want to animate that much. Revan's cape took around a year to fully animate, and that was just two parts of the model.

[Hunters Run]

Hmmm...it should be simpler to add preexisting animations to darth malaks model. However I believe you would need to rerig the model.

[Sithspecter]

Well, it seems that many of the unique models that do not contain all of the animations have unique parts also, in Malak's case, the little "capelets" that he has coming off him. When you did the TSL Revan's Robes, Revan's model already was rigged for all of the existing animations, because it was the same size and had all the same parts. I may be wrong, but I think that the larger size of Malak would inhibit some of this. But by all means, if it works, it works. Go for it.

[Trench]

Ӄhrizby replaced Darth Nihilus' skeleton with the generic character one, and HK-47's skeleton with the Wookiee skeleton. He may have some tips and tricks.

[Hunters Run]

Well, it seems that many of the unique models that do not contain all of the animations have unique parts also, in Malak's case, the little "capelets" that he has coming off him. When you did the TSL Revan's Robes, Revan's model already was rigged for all of the existing animations, because it was the same size and had all the same parts. I may be wrong, but I think that the larger size of Malak would inhibit some of this. But by all means, if it works, it works. Go for it.

 

You're right. Thanks to Khrizby rigging shouldn't be a problem if I follow his tutorial. However, someone would still need to animate his cape and flaps as they would not animate by themselves.

[Darth Avlectus]

I looked into this too, and from what I understand, all the switching and matching existing model skeletons and existing animations is a little less complicated versus making your own animations.

 

Someone asked if I could make a facepalm for Atton with GMAX. I wasn't sure and didn't have an answer, but I did get answers similar to above from our folks on xat chat. Figured I'd chime in since this is related.

 

IFF it could be done, it would have to be either taking a similar animation and modifying/replacing it...or attempting to make a new one and fit it in there. Problem with the latter is that there are only so many spaces available for functions in the first place (this is learned in more detail when you learn about hexadecimal and binary and how it ties in with programming). So it may not be possible to "add" a new move, and you may have no choice but to replace something which is already there. Unfortunately I cannot answer which case that may be.

 

If it were a case of creating a new animation, you'd probably be opening a can of worms with bugs and compatability issues. Not discouragement, but rather observations I have made both from people here and from porfessionals I have met IRL.